10 Years Later, ‘Interstellar’ Is the Hottest Movie in Theaters
On its tenth anniversary, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is back in cinemas, showing on 70MM IMAX screens. Cue your sobbing Matthew McConaughey memes.
As stooped in science as it was in raw emotion, the film starred Matthew McConaughey as a man who joins a space mission hoping to save humankind from extinction, but must leave behind his family with an uncertain fate that he will ever return. It matches high-minded theoretical physics with big emotions—it was Nolan attempting to simultaneously flex on his fascinations and stretch past his previous limitations.
And he doubled down on film presentation in the process: The film featured over an hour of footage shot with IMAX cameras and was released in 70MM IMAX, along with standard 70MM and 35MM prints years after most multiplexes had abandoned film in favor of digital projection. This was treated at the time as a pet fascination for an upstream-swimming Nolan, but now, film presentation is an event.
Interstellar was Nolan’s first film after The Dark Knight Rises, the closing chapter of the Batman trilogy that brought him a fervent fandom. Expectations were perhaps unmatchably high for the film in 2014. Along with Nolan’s ascendancy, the film looked like a victory lap for the McConnaisance, the period of career resurgence for McConaughey that had months prior landed him an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.
Reactions were decidedly mixed, even among Nolan acolytes. The Daily Beast called it “Wildly Ambitious, Very Flawed, and Absolutely Worth Seeing.” Despite respectable box office, the film was viewed with a patina of disappointment and unfavorable comparisons to the previous year’s visceral space adventure, Gravity.
This re-release allows not only the opportunity for reassessment of the film, but for it to be seen in the format with which Nolan’s name has become synonymous. “The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled,” as Nolan told the AP on Oppenheimer’s release, “You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”
And Nolan’s commitment to the large-scale experience is shared among his fans. “For me, the appeal of seeing something in IMAX is simply the appeal of seeing something the way that the filmmaker intends it to be seen,” says Clay Keller, host of popular film podcast Screen Drafts,
“If Christopher Nolan, or any director, shoots a film or part of a film with 70mm IMAX cameras, then that is the way in which I want to see it exhibited.”
Keller, who saw both Interstellar and Oppenheimer in their initial 70MM IMAX runs, notes that moviegoer desire for IMAX has increased over the past decade. And that, despite his mixed feelings on the film, viewing it in Nolan’s preferred way enhances the film: “Interstellar makes particularly good use of the enormity of IMAX, with its sequences on vast desolate planets, and its dazzling celestial events. And there is simply no better way to convey the awe-inspiring emptiness of space than on a true IMAX screen.”
But if you haven’t already booked your ticket, good luck securing one from any of the film’s 10 engagements in North America. The 70MM IMAX return of Interstellar has already seen sellout business, including from early morning screenings. Gothamist reported that resale tickets are already above $200 for NYC showings (nearly 10 times face value). So what’s your best shot at a ticket? How does a weekday 2 a.m. showtime in Dallas sound?
This demand for such a divisive film even among Nolan devotees is nevertheless unsurprising, given the format’s success with Nolan’s most recent film. Oppenheimer experienced months of sell-out business in the format—including an encore run once awards season had begun—with reports of moviegoers traveling out-of-state and booking showtimes in the wee hours of the morning. With only 30 theatres in the world able to present the format, Oppenheimer made $17 million from those 70MM IMAX locations in its first month of release. Whether driven by the rarity of the experience or devotion to Nolan or both, the hunger is there to experience a film in this way.
Even if you are not among the lucky souls to catch this brief large-scale return, Interstellar remains ripe for a revisit, especially after the near universal praise that Oppenheimer was granted. With the more sobering work Nolan has done since, Interstellar is singular in his film’s for its emotional daring, perhaps revealing more of the artist himself than he has ever been willing to show. It is his most misunderstood film, arriving when audiences were most likely to be ungenerous to Nolan’s particular obsessions of time, science, and innovation. But it also might be his best.
For all of its brain-bursting science, it is ultimately a film about the cosmic force of love and the consequences of what we do with the little time we are afforded. Now that he finally has his Oscar and fans are salivating over every rumor and cast addition for his next film, Nolan’s most divisive film might get the credit it deserves.
